"He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world
And shudders to the marrow, 'Save this child?
Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop here!
Who was it dared lay hand upon the ark
His betters saw fall nor put finger forth?'"
Worst of all, the Convent of the Convertites, women to whom she was
consigned for help,
"They do help; they are prompt to testify
To her pure life and saintly dying days.
She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!
What does the body that lives through helpfulness
To women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,
The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!
'Seeing that this our Convent claims of right
What goods belong to those we succour, be
The same proved women of dishonest life,--
And seeing that this Trial made appear
Pompilia was in such predicament,--
The Convent hereupon pretends to said
Succession of Pompilia, issues writ,
And takes possession by the Fisc's advice.'
Such is their attestation to the cause
Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:
But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse
To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?
Christ must give up his gains then! They unsay
All the fine speeches,--who was saint is whore."
It is not wonderful if his review of all the mean and dolorous
circumstance of this cycle of wrong brings the Pope face to face with
the unconquerable problem for the Christian believer, the keystone
of the grim arch of religious doubt and despair, through which the
courageous soul must needs pass to creeds of reason and life. Where is
"the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable metamorphosis" in
human worth that should in some sort justify the consummate price that
had been paid for man these seventeen hundred years before?
"Had a mere adept of the Rosy Cross
Spent his life to consummate the Great Work,
Would not we start to see the stuff it touched
Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got
By the old smelting-process years ago?
If this were sad to see in just the sage
Who should profess so much, perform no more,
What is it when suspected in that Power
Who undertook to make and made the world,
Devised and did effect man, body and soul,
Ordained salvation for them both, and yet ...
Well, is the thing we see, salvation?"
It is certain that by whatever other deficiencies it may be marked
_The Ring and the Book_ is blameless for the most characteristic of
all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of
thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck
into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a
half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself,
by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of
poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning's
intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving
cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction,
and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great
drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye,
or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or
understanding. It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact
which is at the root of his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought,
and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid,
that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere
making of music, on the other. Regret as we may the fantastic rudeness
and unscrupulous barbarisms into which Mr. Browning's art too often
falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever
remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates
the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the
vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the
thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the
thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the
writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story
and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of
true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing
stimulus to the interest of the appreciative reader.
At first sight _The Ring and the Book_ appears to be absolutely wanting
in that grandeur which, in a composition of such enormous length,
criticism must pronounce to be a fundamental and indispensable element.
In an ordinary way this effect of grandeur is produced either by some
heroic action surrounded by circumstances of worthy stateliness, as in
the finest of the Greek plays; or as in _Paradise Lost_ by the presence
of personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and association; or as in
_Faust_ or _Hamlet_ by the stupendous moral abysses which the poet
discloses fitfully on this side and that. None of these things are to be
found in _The Ring and the Book_ The action of Caponsacchi, though noble
and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for
it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the
contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or
ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his
magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, no
deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, no voluntary submission
to a lifelong endurance. True, this came in the end, but it was an end
unforeseen, and one, therefore, not to be associated with the first
conception of the original act. Besides, Guido is so saturated with
hateful and ignoble motive as to fill the surrounding air with
influences that preclude heroic association. It has been said of the
great men to whom the Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that
even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as if that too had been
touched by the evil breath of the times. And in like manner we may say
of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched him in the way of
resistance detracts from pure heroism. Perhaps the same consideration
explains the comparative disappointment which most people seem to have
felt with _Pompilia_ in the third volume. Again, there is nothing which
can be rightly called majesty of character visible in one personage or
another. There is high devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and free
sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an
incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it
sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness
of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in _The Ring and the
Book_ of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his
own _Faust_. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly
commensurable by the very framework of its story:--
"pure crude fact,
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since."
It moves from none of the supernatural agencies which give the impulse
to our interest in _Faust_, nor from the sublimer passions and
yearning after things unspeakable alike in _Faust_ and in _Hamlet._
Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accustomed elements of grandeur,
there is a profound impressiveness about _The Ring and the Book_
which must arise from the presence of some other fine compensating
or equivalent quality. Perhaps one may say that this equivalent for
grandeur is a certain simple touching of our sense of human kinship,
of the large identity of the conditions of the human lot, of the
piteous fatalities which bring the lives of the great multitude of men
to be little more than "grains of sand to be blown by the wind." This
old woe, the poet says, now in the fulness of the days again lives,
"_If precious be the soul of man to man_."
This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which his poem makes
successful appeal. Nor is it mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the
blind and fortuitous groping of men and societies of men after truth
and justice and traces of the watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of
God." Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts of our
condition to some diviner, ever-present law, which helps to knit us to
our kind, our brethren "whom we have seen."
"Clouds obscure--
But for which obscuration all were bright?
Too hastily concluded! Sun-suffused,
A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,--
Better the very clarity of heaven:
The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports?
How can man love but what he yearns to help
And that which men think weakness within strength
But angels know for strength and stronger get--
What were it else but the first things made new,
But repetition of the miracle,
The divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends and aye begins for man?"